


A Rip in Time and Space

by DaisyFairy



Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett, Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Confused John, Crossover, Experiment gone wrong, Gen, I Don't Even Know, Interdimensional Rift, John is protective of his tea, Sherlock Challenge, Things from the Dungeon Dimension, i can't tag
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-13
Updated: 2017-03-13
Packaged: 2018-10-03 22:07:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,118
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10259657
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DaisyFairy/pseuds/DaisyFairy
Summary: Written for the Sherlock Challenge March Prompt: Experiment Gone Wrong.Sherlock has been experimenting in the flat and John is surprised to find a swirling vortex of light in the kitchen.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I have slightly missed my deadline of the 12th March, but hopefully it is still the 12th somewhere.
> 
> This was written for the second anniversary of Sir Terry Pratchett's death. He was an author who influenced my outlook on life ever since I first read one of his books when I was 13. The world is poorer for no longer having him in it. I hope he wouldn't have minded me borrowing his characters.
> 
> I'm not sure how much sense this will make it you haven't read Discworld. Give it a try?

John walks slowly upstairs carrying the bags of shopping. He pauses as he enters the living room. Sherlock is sitting in his chair serenely drinking tea and flipping through an interior design magazine. The rest of the room however looks like a small bull has been on the rampage while he was out. The coffee table is upended, the piles of papers and files have been strewn across the floor, Sherlock's music stand had fallen over and the sofa has been shoved at an angle across the room. So far so normal, for Baker Street anyway.

It is when he enters the kitchen that he knows something is very wrong. He stares for a full five seconds at the thing in the middle of the room, then places the shopping bags onto the worktop, as far away from IT as he can. He walks slowly into the living room trying very hard not to stamp his feet as he does so. He stands square in front of Sherlock who had so far not acknowledged his presence at all.

"I'm not shouting at you."

"I can hear that."

"And I'm staying calm."

"Good, I do worry about your blood pressure you know."

He clenches his fist, "But what. The. Hell. Is that in the kitchen?"

"Oh, that. I was doing an experiment,"

"Right."

"and I might have, well I did..."

"Yes?"

"Rip a hole in the space/time continuum."

John sighs, "Of course you did."

"It was an accident John, I was trying to invent a method to..."

"Don't want to know. So that thing in the kitchen?"

"The swirling vortex of red glowing light? That is a portal to another dimension."

"It's green."

Sherlock looks at him, a worried frown crosses his face for a second, then he settles back to his previous unreadable expression. "Green? ... It'll be fine, I'm sure that's fine."

"Have you called anyone? Your brother?"

"What would he do? No. It's all in hand, don't panic."

"I'm not panicking."

"Your jaw is set, you are clenching your fist, and you are standing so hard at attention that I am worried you are going to sprain something. Also you keep checking the exits and glancing at the items you deem to be of value to evaluate if you have time to take them with you if we evacuate. You are panicking. There is no need, it is being handled."

John tries to calm down and loosen his muscles with only limited success. "Ok, so what is the plan?"

"I should probably tell you what happened first."

Closing his eyes and just breathing for a second helps, he nods and sits in his armchair to listen.

"I was doing my experiment, when suddenly the portal appeared. The first thing that came through it..."

John is on his feet in a split second "The first?! Jesus, things have come through it?!"

"Yes, so the first things was a wooden box. Like a trunk with a lid bound in metal. It was quite large, around the size of a Great Dane." 

John narrows his eyes, why would you measure a box in terms of a dog? Surely you would measure it in relation to the coffee table, an armchair, something inanimate."

"I tried to open it to see what was inside."

"As you do with boxes that have materialised in the middle of your kitchen." John says sarcastically.

"Yes, exactly. So I tried to open it, but it snapped at me."

"Snapped?"

"The lid lifted and it tried to close on my arm. I managed to pull free in time but it did tear my shirt with its teeth." Sherlock holds up his arm and looks mournfully at a ragged tear in his sleeve.

John sits back down and tips his head back as if to implore for help from a higher power.

"I was trying again using the kitchen tongs..."

"We are binning those." John commands.

"No need. The box ate them." Sherlock declares happily.

"So I was trying to open it again when it licked it's lips, ate the tongs, and ran into the living room. It then ran in circles barging into the furniture until its owner appeared."

John let out a sob.

"He was a skinny man, a long wispy beard and robes that looked like they had seen better days. He was wearing a rather interesting hat with a sequin decoration that he had obviously applied himself. The stitch work was quite good but I'm afraid his spelling was deplorable."

John shakes his head and mutters under his breath "That's what you look for in interdimensional beings, good spelling."

"Good spelling is important whichever dimension you come from. Anyway he came in trying to call the box to him. When he saw me he yelled something like 'begone foul fiend.' and drew some kind of symbol in the air. I then had to spend ten minutes convincing him I wasn't a Thing from the Dungeon Dimensions."

John peers around the room. "He's gone, right?"

"Oh. Yes. Once I'd convinced him he seemed quite excited, said something about there being no magic here and Roundworld and then went back to find someone to close the rift."

"Thank goodness for that. So it's all thing to be sorted out."

"Yes." Sherlock says, but he doesn't look entirely convinced that this is good news.

John sighs, "What's wrong now?"

"He refused to help me get access to this Dungeon Dimension of his. It sounds fascinating John. Imagine the experiments I could carry out, the creatures I could discover. He barely seemed to know anything about the Things that live there. He just kept saying that he quite liked his face and didn't want it pulled off by tentacles."

"Can't say I blame him." John says with a sigh.

Just then they hear some bickering coming from the kitchen and then two men appear in the doorway, one of them is just as Sherlock described, he is looking around the room nervously. They are both wearing pointy hats with wide brims and long robes but where the first mans robes look like they have always been threadbare even when brand new the other man has robes that look like they were once high quality but have been stained by spills in a rainbow of colours and perched on the brim of his hat is a pair of thick protective goggles.

Sherlock steps forward. "Sherlock Holmes, this is my friend Dr John Watson, and you are?"

"Ponder Stibbons, Head of Inadvisably Applied Magic, you've met my colleague Rincewind." He pulls out his thaumometer and turns to Rincewind, "You are quite right, no magic at all in this universe. I'm fairly certain that we have found a way into Roundworld." Then turning back to Sherlock he says, "So, you are the one who opened this little tear in the fabric of reality. Very well done."

Sherlock smiles at the praise "Oh, I wasn't actually trying to."

"Yes, very well done." Ponder continues not really listening and looking around curiously.

"Umm, I'm, I'm just going to... go then." Rincewind stammers, then without waiting for an answer slinks back into the kitchen. 

Ponder comes further into the room and looks around with interest, peering closely at the electric lights, telephone and tv. Before they can stop him he is prising open the back of the television to look inside.

"Amazing. You actually run all of this without magic."

"Um, yeeaah." John says uncertainly, looking to Sherlock for confirmation. Sherlock nods at him but looks incredulous that John seems confused about this. To be fair to John he hadn't actually thought there was magic involved in how these things worked, he was just in such a state of confusion he would have wanted Sherlock to confirm his own name if he was asked it. John sounds slightly more confident when he continues, "I mean, no, no magic, it's electric."

"Ah, powered by lightening. Very interesting." Ponder looks up sharply, "There is something though." He starts to pat down his pockets looking for something. He pulls out a device that looks like the love child of a hand whisk and a camcorder. He starts turning the handle and peers at the dials. He frowns and runs out of the flat into the street.

"He's going to get some funny looks dressed like that." John declares, unsure if he should be doing something about this possible invasion from another dimension.

Sherlock looks down at the street from the window. "Oh look, he nearly got run over by a car. Now he seems to be trying to convince the driver to let him look at the engine." Sherlock just watches for several minutes until Ponder returns to the flat.

"Your horseless carriages are amazing, I really must speak to the Archchanchelor about them. I'm sure we could rig something up. Maybe we can...hmmm, this needs some thought." He pulls some parchment out of his robes and starts scratching formulas and designs onto them.

"Why did you go out there?" John prompts him.

"Oh yes," he shoves the parchment back into his robe and looks at them, "a world without magic, so you should also have no narrativium, and out there you don't, but in here the air is full of the stuff."

Sherlock looks very interested in this declaration, but John is getting more confused by the second "I don't understand. What is..."

Ponder examines his device again, "I recently isolated several different types, or genres, of the narrativium particle. It looks like what you have in here is partially of the mystery genre but largely comprised of..." he fiddles with a knob, "yes, definitely romance genre."

Sherlock scoffs, "That will be John with his ridiculous girlfriends."

Ponder looks between the two men and blinks, then shakes his head, "Hmm." He pulls out a deck of rather worn looking cards and holds then out asking Sherlock to chose one. Sherlock does and Ponder snatches it before Sherlock can look. He looks slowly between John and Sherlock with his eyes narrowed. "Oh... Well, I'm sure you'll work it out eventually."

He stashes his things inside his robe as John and Sherlock shoot each other confused looks, then starts to talk distractedly, almost to himself, "We can't leave the rift like this, a tear like that, risks attracting other things, no, it has to be closed." 

He looks up and his eyes sharpen as he focuses on Sherlock, "I need to get back. I'll get Hex to work out the incantation to close it when I get there, we'll have this sorted in no time. It's a shame, I'd have liked to see a bit more of the place. Well, goodbye Mr. Holmes, Dr. Watson." He shakes their hands enthusiastically.

"Um. Thank you?" John says uncertainly.

"Goodbye Mr. Stibbons Are you quite sure we can't leave this link open? It really is fascinating."

Ponder frowns regretfully, "I'm sorry, as much as I understand the desire to experiment, it really is too dangerous." Before any further argument can be made he steps through the rift with a wave.

John and Sherlock exchange a glance and then Ponder's disembodied head appears from the vortex. "It might be an hour or so until we can get it sorted, just keep your eyes open for anything with tentacles, or suckers, or too many legs. Hit it with a poker, or even better, set it on fire, you'll be fine." Then he is gone.

John stares at the swirling vortex of light, that has now taken on a blue tinge. He is feeling rather blindsided by this whole thing, but snaps out of it quickly when he sees Sherlock pulling the chefs blowtorch out of the cupboard, the blowtorch that he had been explicitly banned from using.

"What are you doing?"

"Protection John." Sherlock says with glee, "He said we need fire."

John plucks the potential death trap out of his friends hands, "I'll take charge of that, thank you."

Sherlock throws himself dramatically into a kitchen chair to begin a sulk and John shrugs his shoulders and sets about putting away the shopping giving the vortex an occasional glance. At one point a fleshy tentacle reaches out for the tea bags, but as a red blooded British man there are some things worth running from and some things worth defending. He slams the cupboard door on it and it is hastily pulled back through the vortex along with some whimpering noises. Suddenly there is a whooshing noise and the vortex vanishes.

John puts the last item away in the fridge then turns to the sulking detective, "Right, Thai or Chinese?"

**Author's Note:**

> So there it is. It is slightly insane and not a lot happened but I hope you liked it.
> 
> I love kudos and comments, hint hint.


End file.
